The Fly Guy (18 page)

“Spiral,” said Ted, and the doors closed.

***

Chapter Twenty-Six

Henry is just finishing the last cigarette in the pack. The car park has been quiet, a slow steady exchange of cars, a couple arguing, one guy spending a little too long looking over the edge. No-one looks over the edge of a car park for that long unless they are planning to jump. “Don’t do it,” Henry whispers, and then in the rearview mirror the lift doors open to reveal Scorpion. His broad shoulders fill the small rectangle of the mirror. He stoops as he steps out. He is so big that in a few steps he is at the pay station. The ticket is tiny in his hand as he looms over the machine.

Henry gets out and walks around the other side of the cars to get to the pay station as Scorpion grabs his ticket from the machine and walks quickly to his car. Henry grabs his too and gets to his car just as Scorpion is pulling out.

Out of the car park there is a one-way system making Scorpion take a left. As soon as there’s a break in the traffic coming the other way he swings his big four-by-four in a wild U-turn and joins the beeping, swerving stream of traffic going the opposite way. As he passes Henry sees him leaning forward over the wheel, his face set in grim concentration. The other drivers are still cursing him, and then he’s gone.

Henry puts his tracker on the seat beside him and looks for the next opportunity to turn around. He watches the red dot on the screen move erratically through the city and then, just as Henry manages to find a turning, the dot slows down and settles into a more predictable pattern. Not trying to get away then, thinks Henry, but trying to keep someone in sight. Scorpion is following someone. By the time Henry has the car back in sight, the rush is over, he must have found who he was looking for.

Henry overtakes and gets closer to Scorpion’s car. Usually Henry wouldn’t track so close behind, but when you’re following someone you’re not inclined to check if you’re being followed. As they leave the centre of the city behind and pass the turnings for the suburbs and satellite towns, Henry drops back. The traffic is less dense and Henry spots who Scorpion is following. It’s a black BMW with tinted windows and it’s heading straight for the docklands.

Henry follows the red dot on the GPS monitor and travels parallel. As soon as they hit the old docklands, he turns back onto the road behind the big four-by-four. He knows that when Scorpion stops he will have to be close. He knows the grid of the docklands well, and what’s in it. He also knows how easily things disappear. It’s a rundown landscape that has gone beyond its time. It’s a place for discarded ideas, no longer useful to the rest of the city. Henry has searched these shadows and seen what they hold. Now as he follows Scorpion he feels he is going back, back to where the Fly Guy nests.

The darkness that is here in the docklands is old, it was here at the very beginning of the city, when the first boats started trading and people began building. It was pushed back, forced into the corners and to the edges. Now the city has moved on, and the old darkness that was waiting for so long has come back.

* * *

Kayleigh is in the shower. Lucy can hear the water running and Kayleigh singing some song about love to herself.

Lucy starts to search the apartment. She looks in the small wardrobe, where Kayleigh’s dresses, skirts, and tops hang crammed together above her array of boots and heels and sneakers. She quickly rummages through the drawers, through bras and socks, through a drawer of belts and scarves, through cartons and tubes of body creams, packets of false nails, gels, hair rollers, fake eyelashes. Moving into the kitchen she scans through the shelves, past cereals, sauces, plastic containers of pasta and rices, sachets of flavourings.

The water stops and she hears Kayleigh sing. Her voice is weak and sweet and tuneless, like a child’s.
But then you left me and now I’m blue as blue can be,
she sings. Lucy turns. There, under the window is a low table with a stack of books and fashion magazines. It’s solid underneath. Lucy goes and lifts the table slightly. It comes up. The low table top is a lid. She quickly puts the books and magazines on the ground and lifts it open.

There is a dark hold-all. She recognises it. It’s the hold-all from Archie’s apartment. She unzips it and reaches inside. There is a plastic bag which seems to be sealed. She makes a little tear. It is packed with blue pills. Kayleigh is still in the bathroom. Lucy goes back to the bedroom and takes a tube of false nail glue from the drawer. She takes two pills from the bag then dabs a spot of glue on the plastic, sealing the little tear.

By the time Kayleigh is out of the shower, the lid is closed and the books and magazines are stacked back on top. Kayleigh is still humming the tune she was singing, rubbing her long dark hair with a towel.

Lucy asks, “Hey have you got plans for today? ’Cause I got some fun on me.”

“I have a lecture later, but it’s a really boring one so, well, what do you mean fun?”

“Well, I was saving them for a special occasion, but what’s say we make one?”

She opens her palm and holds out two little blue pills. Kayleigh stops drying her hair and steps forward to look at what she has. Her eyes widen and she says, “Oooh,” and her lips purse as if she’s just tasted something surprising, something that she likes the taste of very much.

* * *

In between the crumbling buildings on a potholed street Scorpion stops. Off in the distance, Henry sees that the BMW has stopped, too, at a large fenced off area of waste land, the rubble of an old rubber processing plant, demolished decades ago.

Henry pulls over. He reaches into the glove compartment and takes out his binoculars as the door of the BMW opens. The man getting out is dark, he looks Asian; he has brown skin and thick black hair. He stretches out his hand as it is taken by another man in a dark suit, who is bald and wears glasses. They disappear through the wire fence. In the foreground the door of the four-by-four opens, blocking out everything else. Henry takes the binoculars down and watches Scorpion get out. He walks down the derelict road like a giant under the looming buildings, and looking around, pulls back the wire fence, and goes in.

Henry lights a cigarette, sits in his car, and considers. If Scorpion is tracking this Asian guy, he’s not very discreet. He’s bound to get seen, and then what? Henry isn’t inclined to find out. This isn’t an affair. Unless Scorpion is going to stick his dick in one of these guys, it’s none of his business.

Henry can leave now and track the car later. He is just about to start his engine when Scorpion comes back out onto the road and breaks into a run to his car. Henry ducks down, lying across the passenger seat. He hears the four-by-four start up, and with a screech of its tyres and a revving of its engine it takes off.

Henry sits up just in time to see it turn right at the end of the road. Then he slides down in his seat with his binoculars to his eyes, looking through the arch of his steering wheel. The Asian guy and his bald friend appear, talking and shaking hands again. They go their separate ways, the Asian guy back into his BMW and the bald one across the road and away down a side street. The BMW drives away.

Henry sits back up and takes the last drag of his cigarette before opening his door and stepping out onto the footpath. He stubs the cigarette out under his shoe and walks to the wire fence. He looks at the interior of a warehouse without the exterior walls. There are some partition walls, barely standing, covered in graffiti, surrounded by rubble and debris. Flies rise from the ground as he walks, buzzing around his thin frame and the deep dark smell of rotting meat rises with them. Pipes stick up from the ground and the flies land at the mouths, swarming into the darkness. There is a broken hand wash basin and weeds growing through shattered bricks, all covered with a chalky white residue.

He pushes the wire aside and walks in, following a path through the rubble. His eyes sting and water as the smell gets thicker until he reaches a wall which is intact and a steel door. Henry pulls on the heavy handle and the door swings slowly open, revealing a pitch-black rectangle of cold air. He takes his torch from his pocket and shines its thin powerful beam into the darkness. A big empty room. A meeting place, Henry thinks, but they didn’t stay very long. Henry clicks off the torch and stands there in the darkness for a moment. Here in this black space everything is still.

He turns to face the doorway. He clicks his torch on again and scans the thin beam of light around to find the edges of the room. He sees a pile of something in the far corner, it looks like a white bag. As he approaches he sees it is a set of clothes, a short white leather skirt, a ripped netted top, and a white leather jacket. A pair of white high heels lie a few feet away. There are bloodstains on the jacket and on the skirt. He moves the clothes with his foot to see if there was anything else, and sees a spread of red stain on the ground.

Henry straightens up again and clicks his torch off, letting the darkness cover what he has seen. In that moment he feels his phone vibrate and then ring and echo around the empty room. His heart jumps, his breath stops, and his brain swells, an electric wave rushing though his body, pushing against his skull. He knows who is calling. The call display reads Unknown. With breath held and chest tight he presses answer. The misshapen voice slowly rasps and scrapes its way into his ear.

“Blooooomburg. Thisss is when I tellll yooou … to ruuun.” Henry flashes his torch as he spins around, the thin beam frantically searching the brutal malevolent darkness as the breathing in his ear rattles and sucks.

Henry screams as loud as he can, emptying his lungs and screeching as if his throat has caught fire, “Fuckyoufuckyou! Where are you? Fuuck you!!” but it feels like shouting at a mountain, screaming up at a cliff face about to collapse.

The voice comes again, louder, “Ruuuun Bloooombuuuurg,” and Henry, terrified, sprints back through the doorway in to the dull daylight, past the ruins and rubble, through the wire fence and to his car.

Cold with panic, he turns the key and the tyres shriek as he speeds away, his heart thumping wildly. The deserted streets of the docklands flash past, and only once he is back on the outskirts of the city, he begins to slow down and feels the sweat covering his face and neck and his hands loosen from the wheel.

He stops in traffic. Around him, he sees the faces of people safe in their cars, mouthing along with inane car music or looking vacantly out the window, waiting for their turn to move. They have no idea.

Henry puts his head in his hands. His shirt is wet on his back. He feels older, much older than before. I need to find him and finish this, he thinks. He turns on the GPS tracker again. Scorpion is headed back to Kayleigh’s.

***

Chapter Twenty-Seven

When Martin got home it was dark. He knocked on the door. Alison opened it and threw herself into his arms.

“Where have you been? I was so worried,” she said.

“I—”

“I didn’t know what to do! Why didn’t you take your phone? I always tell you to take your phone out. You’ve been gone all day.”

“Alison, let’s go inside. Let me in, come on.”

“I thought you’d been knocked over on your run, Martin, I thought something terrible had happened.…”

Martin eased her back through the door and closed it. “I’m okay, I’m okay. I’ve got some news—”

“I looked at your work and oh, oh, it’s all about meeting strange men for drug deals or something. Martin I was so worried.…”

“Shh, Alison, listen: I’ve got a job. I’ve got a job.”

She leaned back to look at him. She wiped her tears from her cheeks and said, “You’ve what?”

“I’ve got a job. At Spiral, the printers on the Crown—”

“The printers? Ted from the club?”

“Ted from the club! He’s given me a job.”

She looked him up and down. “You’re still in your running shorts. Did you run there? What…?”

With their arms around each other, Martin told her what had happened. Alison was very excited. She insisted on running out in the car and buying some champagne.

He stood in the shower and watched the foam move over his body. His waist was slimmer than he could remember it. Maybe he just hadn’t looked at himself so much before. Before she ran out the door to buy champagne Alison had said that it’s all part of the change, that she knew it would happen, she’s so happy that he took the job.

She hadn’t asked about the book in a long time. He had stopped volunteering information. He had never once mentioned Lucy. Lucy, who is in the clean warm apartment sitting opposite her new best friend, who is asking,
Is this it? Am I up yet? How long should we wait?
For all the time he had spent behind the door of the upstairs room, Alison had stopped asking about what it was he was creating, or what he had destroyed.

After the shower he shaved his face, scraping away the tough dark stubble. He stepped back from the mirror and angled his face this way and that. He needed a haircut again, the top was starting to look scruffy. He looked at his shoulders and arms. All of this running was not doing anything for his upper body definition. Weights. Maybe that was the next thing.

He had never spent so much time looking at himself since he started running. He thought that the more he looked at himself, the less he looked like what he had always thought he looked like. His hairline was higher, his eyes were bigger. His mouth seemed smaller. Maybe it had just been hidden by the beard for so long. This mirror was much better than the old cracked and stained mirror he had looked in when he lived in the bedsit. Now maybe he was just seeing himself clearly. Or maybe it was part of the change. How long had it being happening? Change happens slowly.

By the time he got downstairs Alison was back. She had two bottles of champagne and was looking in the cupboard for the right glasses to use.

“Two bottles?”

“Well,” she replied, turning around from the cupboard triumphantly with two tall champagne flutes, “things are going well at the office, too. The docklands contracts are starting to come in. Andre is very happy. We’ve got hold of three plots so far. Have we got that ice-cream that I like, you know the fancy one? I think it’s in the bottom drawer.”

In the freezer there were packets of food he had forgotten about, and a full trout, belly split, its head still on, rock hard. Underneath was a tub of chocolate ice cream. He pulled it out. She was pouring the champagne.

Alison said, “When are you going to start?”

“Well, he said if I want to get in at the start of next week, there is a staff seminar and training for the in-house computer networks, so my timing is just right. Then he can put me with a team who can show me the ropes. It’s all happened a bit fast really.”

“I know, isn’t it great?” Alison handed him his glass. “Ted must really like you.”

They clinked glasses. Alison leaned in and kissed him. Then she took a spoonful of the ice cream. “Mmmm, chocolate ice cream and fizz. It’s the simple things that make a moment special, isn’t it babe?”

Martin nodded and leaned in for another kiss. She put the chocolate covered spoon on his nose. They laughed.

That night she told him that she felt this was a turning point, this was the new platform he could build upon. What a journey they had been on, it was a testament to how their relationship was so good that both of them were progressing. They kissed. She stroked his neck and kissed his shaven chin and jaw and around to his ear.

“Let’s go upstairs. Give me a minute, then come up.”

When Martin went up, she was lying in the bed under the duvet. As he walked toward the bed, she pulled the duvet back to show a red lacy bra and smiled, then pursed her lips in a pout, patting the bed next to her. Martin undressed and climbed into bed. They kissed and moved over one another, exploring each other’s skin. Alison climbed on top of him, straddling him, grinding her pelvis against his, pushing her cleavage into his face. She reached between his legs and felt his flaccid penis. She tugged at it.

She started whispering in his ear, “Come on baby, you know what I want,
come on, feel how wet I am, come on,” but the more she spoke the less Martin felt any connection to what was going on. Alison said, “What can I do? What can I do for you?”

Martin couldn’t even reply, he just shook his head. Alison kept trying for a while then, climbed off and lay next to him, defeated.

“Martin, it’s been so long now. What is it? Is it that you don’t fancy me anymore?”

“It’s just a phase, just a dip. We’ll come out of it.”

“We? Martin I don’t know what it is I should do, I haven’t changed.”

Martin didn’t answer. He heard sounds from outside creep into the room. A car passed. A front door closed. Another engine started somewhere. Underneath, like a rumble from a deep underground river, was the dull thick sound of the motorway. It took Martin by surprise. Now that he heard it, it was loud. How could he not have heard that before? It had been there all along. Alison turned on her side, propped her head up on her hand, and looked down at him.

“At least I don’t think I have. Martin? What have you got to say about it?”

“I don’t really know.”

“I can’t remember the last time you took control. It would be nice, for that to happen. I don’t want to be the one pushing all the time. Martin?”

Martin put his arm across his eyes and said, “Look, it’s nothing. I mean it’s not the most important thing is it? It’s just a blip. I’m sorry, okay?”

Alison lay down again and put her arm and leg over Martin, getting as close as she could to him.

“We don’t spend as much time together as we used to, do we? Not real time. We used to talk for hours. We did, didn’t we? And you used to say all sorts of beautiful things. You don’t say the kinds of things to me you used to.”

Martin took his arm away from his eyes and looked at the ceiling for a moment. He wished the light was off.

“What do you mean? What kinds of things?”

“Oh, just things. Romantic things. Idealistic things.”

“I can’t keep repeating myself, Alison, if that’s what you want me to do. Once something is said, there’s not much point in saying it over and over. I mean what do you want me to do? Say everything is wonderful? The world is just what we want it to be? Our love is the most perfect, special thing that has ever been? The world can go to hell, sink under weight of its own fucking misery, but we will always live in bliss if we have each other? Will that do?”

Alison drew away from him. She turned around and crossed her arms and pulled her legs up to her chest.

“Alison, don’t do that. What do you want—”

“No Martin, stop now. You’ve ruined it, just stop.”

She was crying. He threw back the cover and got out of the bed noisily, slamming the door as he left the bedroom. He reached over and slammed the office door too, and then went down the stairs and stood in the front room, clenching and unclenching his fists.

He looked around the darkened room for something that he could break, something that would make a satisfying crash, something that wouldn’t cost a lot to replace. He wanted to swing his fist and knock through the wall. He wanted to push his shoulders back, chest out, stretch his arms, to grow above the roofs and pick houses from the street, holding a home in each hand, and squash them together, crushing the bricks into dust and scatter the dust into the darkness of the fields and forests beyond the thin wooden fences, to give the darkness back that which was built to dispel it. Instead he stood in the front room between the sofa and the TV and waited for an answer to come.

***